It was a good beginning.I worked well with my then editor, Fiona. (I’m mostly going to avoid giving surnames in this text, because I don’t want to invade the privacy of people whose contacts with me have been, from their point of view, often incidental. Mostly, though, I’m eschewing surnames to make a point. In the course of this narrative, I will talk about all my experiences good and bad. But where those experiences have been poor, they’ve seldom or never been the fault of the individuals concerned . The individuals, almost always, I’ve thoroughly liked – and, indeed, they’ve mostly been fine or good at their jobs. If some of my negative experiences are shared by other authors – as I believe they probably are – that indicates that the problems I’m speaking about have to do with the prevailing culture . . . in which case, it’s the industry, never the individuals, that should take the hits.)The text that we auctioned was 190,000 words long. After a process of close editing, it ended up at slightly more than 180,000 words – a reduction so slight that it bears testimony to my own editorial ruthlessness. I liked the book. So did Fiona. So did, I think, most others in the firm.We had conversations about marketing. The book’s theme was making money, specifically a million pounds, and it was clear that any marketing drive needed to centre on that. A very young, and obviously capable, marketer wanted to enclose scratchcards in the book, offering a chance to win one million pounds. The idea sounded daffy to me. She wanted to give away amillion quid? Ah no, it was explained, the scratchcards offered a chance to win a million; it wouldn’t actually be guaranteed that someone would win it. But there would be a chance, right? I mean, this wasn’t just a con? Oh no, there would be a real chance of someone winning, ‘but don’t worry, we can insure against that.’That idea died on closer analysis, though as I recall the killer issue was less the giving-away-a-million-pounds part, and more the difficulty of enclosing scratchcards in the book in a way that was secure but nevertheless allowed a reader to riffle through the pages. But still. The fact that the idea ever surfaced in the first place said something about the firm’s brio and commitment. The book’s publisher (Fiona’s boss, in effect) later told me that he remembered the acquisition of The Money Makers as marking a turn in the energies and ambitions of the firm. Not that the book brought about that turn, just that it was lucky to be around at the right time.Then there was the matter of timeline. We’d discussed this at those opening meetings, so it didn’t come as a surprise – except that, well, things did seem slow. We sold the book to HarperCollins in October 1998. The release date was to be February 2000, not quite eighteen months later, but getting on. Given that the whole editorial and copyediting process could have been completed within a matter of weeks, that seemed startlingly distant. Yet there was a logic, a compelling one. Because while readers may think of themselves as mere servants to Literature’s timeless call, the facts prove otherwise. The market for printed books is a highly seasonal affair. The Christmas books market – hardbacks, cookery books, releases by big name authors – begins in around September and continues until new releases largely dry up in the first week or so of December. If a big book comes out in September – a new Dan Brown, for example – that Christmas selling season may even nibble into the last week or two of August.So much for autumn. The summer season (which starts in April or May) is led by paperbacks for the beach. The biggest authors get their books out in the heaviest sales weeks. Everyone else jostles for space around them.Which leaves late winter and early spring as the traditional season for launching debut authors. Since the retail trade starts its buying process a good six months in advance, October 1998 was way too late for us to get a book out in February 1999, so February 2000 it would have to be. My book, as it happened, was set in the three years around the millennium itself, and I’d always assumed that publication would come before that date. The book, somehow, would have worked better that way (and not only because, confident in the destructive nature of the millennium bug, I’d included a passing reference to planes falling out of the sky on the crucial date.) But still: one fluffed plane reference hardly ruined my text. If February 2000 it was to be, then so it was.The book was to be published straight into paperback. At our very first meeting, that idea was presented to me with some timidity, as though I’d be insulted by the indignity of it. A plebian paper cover, when what I wanted was a lordly hardback! I wasn’t insulted. I couldn’t, in fact, see the point of publishing my kind of book – commercial fiction by a debutant author – in hardback at all. Why blow all your marketing spend on a format that few people like and fewer people read? Why whip up publicity for a product that simply won’t sell? It still seems strange to me that the approach isn’t now standard for debut fiction of that sort.I didn’t, of course, simply wait for the second month of the new millennium to roll around. I was an author now. A genuine pro, no longer a wannabe. Since I was contracted to write a second book, that’s just what I began to do. That happy story – a car crash, in truth, and one of my own making – I‘ll leave for another chapter, but it’s worth remembering that though the conventional publishing industry has always been slow, that’s never been the same thing as idle. I am even now halfway through writing my fifth Fiona Griffiths crime novel, while the third novel in that series hasn’t yet come out in paperback in the UK. The pipeline is long, but its maw is always hungry.So, while you may picture me busily writing a terrible second novel, we will speed forward through the various milestones passed by TheMoney Makers on its long journey to print.The cover, for one thing. Covers are stunningly important in selling books. A casual reader browsing in a bookstore won’t, most likely, have read any reviews, or discussed the book with friends. So, while an author may have sweated over his prose, may have reworked a particular plot point several dozen times before being satisfied, may have (as I did) culled and unculled commas while waiting for an agent to say yes, none of this actually affects a reader glancing over those front-of-store tables.Covers have to communicate instantaneously what kind of book lies beneath. People complain about the cliches – the squirly chick-lit fonts in lipstick pink, and all the rest of it – but the cliches are there to make the process of visual sorting rapid and error-free. Covers may also innovate, of course, but innovation is a riskier bet than simply referencing an accepted visual grammar.And what was the visual grammar for my new book? It was an adventure story, certainly, but had no crime, no violence, no men with guns. It appealed to women, but wasn’t women’s fiction. It was contemporary fiction, but it couldn’t get away with those vaguely upmarket covers (pale lake, rowboat rocking by a misty jetty) which are aimed at book-groups and TV-backed reading circles. My book had committed the cardinal crime of being obviously commercial – it was fun to read – but without being genre-specific. Not crime. Not chick-lit. Not sci-fi. Not fantasy.The awkward truth was that The Money Makers lay in that small niche whose crowning glory was and is Jeffrey Archer. Alas, HarperCollins was, at that time, the great man’s publisher so they couldn’t very well pitch me to the trade and to the general reader as being ‘the new Jeffrey Archer’. And Archer’s particular niche had been fashionable in the 1980s, had long become deeply unfashionable, and only Archer and one or two other authors of that era continued to exploit it successfully.My first HarperCollins cover

So a book cover for The Money Makers had to transmit a message that said, roughly, ‘If you like Jeffrey Archer, then this is absolutely the kind of book you’d like, but if you think Archer is badly written and simply passé, we’d encourage you to try this anyway, because we think it’s a refreshing new variant of a breed which – we agree – has seen better days.’ Does that sound confused? Perhaps. In any event, the cover didn’t quite manage to navigate those complexities with total conviction. It boasted a deep blue background, with my name and the title heavily foiled (that is raised, textured and shiny.) In case there wasn’t enough there to keep the Braille readers occupied, the blue background was spattered with dimly-visible blue coins that were themselves somewhat raised and shiny.I wasn’t consulted on the design process, not meaningfully. What happened, in fact, was that a trio of people from HarperCollins took me, my wife and my agent out to lunch. It was an unusually warm day for London and we sat outside at a pleasant Hammersmith restaurant. Starters came. We chatted. Then Nick, the most senior HC guy present, whipped out the cover. Ta-daa! They asked, of course, whether we liked the cover and, when our replies were less than effusive, began to sell it. ‘We wanted readers to think that they must have heard of Harry Bingham, even though, of course, they won’t have done. We wanted a cover with maximum confidence, maximum splash.’ (Gold foil is a relatively expensive cover effect, so ‘splash’ in publisher-ese usually translates into plenty of the shiny stuff.) Although we discussed the cover at fair length, publishers don’t generally show a cover to an author until the design has been largely agreed in-house. From that point onwards, there’s a kind of polite, genteel pressure on the author to say ‘yes’ – a sense that good people would be disappointed if the author weren’t charmed and thrilled.It is, in fact, a dumb way to develop covers. Cover design is hard and groupthink almost inevitably afflicts any in-house process. Often enough, that groupthink comes up with an excellent, or at least acceptable, answer. But sometimes it doesn’t, in which case there are only two external voices a publisher can safely trust: the author and his or her agent. I have never yet known an occasion when agent and author were united in opposition to a cover when that cover did not look, in hindsight, like a poor – and sometimes disastrous – decision.Fifteen years on, I still don’t know if that first book cover was a good one.It was definitely confident, but that wasn’t quite the same as positively good. In my view, something more contemporary was and is the only sane way to launch a new author. (A contemporary version of retro is, of course, still contemporary; my cover was just plain old-fashioned.)On the other hand, I don’t want to be too picky. The damn thing sure looked like it thought a lot of itself. It wasn’t shy. So even if the thing wasn’t wonderful, it was at least going out into the world with a little swagger. This was a book that wanted to sell itself: a very fine attitude, if you ask me.Thus far into my little seedling of a career, everything – still – was going very well.

I left work, cared for my wife, and wrote my first novel.That novel was The Money Makers, the race-to-make-a-million romp that I had conceived some years before. The novel wasn’t high art, by any means, but it was fun, the way Jeffrey Archer would be if reading his prose didn’t make your gums hurt.It took me nine months to write that beast of a book. My writing time was spent, often enough, at my wife’s bedside, she half-dozing, me typing as quietly as I could in the half-light. Strangely, though, the strange and frightening circumstances of the book’s creation show through not at all in the reading of it. The opposite indeed, as though ordinary life, jubilant and irrepressible, was forced burst through the constrictions of that sickened life.I knew I was a beginner, of course. Knew too that my education was hopelessly adapted to the kind of book I wanted to write. So I set myself rules that I adhered to closely. First, I wanted every chapter to have a piece of magic. Some memorable setting, a splash of the unusual. There was one chapter, for example, where it was necessary for one of my protagonists to have a conversation with his father-in-law. There was no reason why that conversation couldn’t have taken place in some perfectly ordinary way: over dinner, on the phone, in an office. I wrote a draft of just such a dialogue. Short, credible, effective. The scene did what was necessary, then moved on. But it bothered me. It was breaking my own rules. So I took the same conversation and re-set it in a helicopter flown from London to Devon in a thunderstorm. Same conversation, different setting – and a much stronger final result.I was also fierce about economy. That may, perhaps, sound implausible when the final product weighed in at a beefy 190,000 words (about 650 paperback pages), but it’s true nevertheless. I used to write a chapter, then go back to it, search out any paragraph or sentence that could be deleted, then delete it. Any word even. It’s a habit I’ve never lost.That wasn’t most of it, though. I was an ex-investment banker and brought a banker’s work ethic to the project. When I re-read my ‘completed’ book, I realised I’d got better: the end was much better than the beginning. It couldn’t really have been otherwise, since I was now 180,000 words more experienced than I had been at the start. So I deleted the first third of the book – 60,000 words, the equivalent of one shortish novel – and rewrote it.And my book got better. I became confident that I had something which would sell. I didn’t know the statistics of success (roughly speaking, a literary agent will reject 999 manuscripts for every one they agree to represent) but nor did I care. My story was a decently written adventure story with a strong concept and a proper ending. How could it not sell? Feeling confident, I bought the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook (the British equivalent of the AmericanWriter’s Market) and chose six agents, more or less at random.The next step was the submission package. Three chapters, a synopsis, and a covering letter. How hard could that be? I plucked three of my stronger chapters from random points in the novel. Wrote a synopsis. Drafted a covering letter which – being an ex-investment banker – I made sure delivered a good, hard pitch for the product I was hawking. Because agents asked for text in double-line spacing, the prospective page count for the novel was nudging seven hundred pages, so I reduced the font-size to ten-point, to keep things manageable. Printed off half a dozen submission packages and popped them in the post.At the time, I was serenely confident that my material would soon secure an offer of representation. With hindsight, I realise I had probably compiled just about the worst submission package in history. The letter was pushy, brash, arrogant. The chapters were a mess, the text all but unreadable for anyone over the age of thirty-five. I waited four weeks, accumulated a handful of rejection letters, then chose another half dozen agents and repeated the process. (Except by this point, I had learned the unwisdom of choosing random chapters and also been kindly advised that sending out unreadable text was a bad idea.) [NB: if you’re a writer and you don’t want to write a terrible covering letter then read this and this. Maybe also this.And if you don’t want to be picking your agents at random, then we’d strongly recommend you use this.]Within weeks, I had two offers of representation, one from the CEO of a large and well-known literary agency, the other from the co-owner of a two-woman agency, which operated out of a West London basement. To have two offers put me in a rare and privileged position: nearly all authors simply say yes to the first agent who offers representation. I was able to choose.I visited both agents. The CEO – a man with a stellar roster of clients – was hardly accustomed to being interviewed, but bore the interrogation with remarkable grace. I liked him. He, and his firm, were entirely impressive. But I couldn’t help but notice that I was never going to be the most important author on that great man’s list. I’d never have the first claim on his time. Felicity, the other agent who offered to represent me, was in a quite different position. Her list, and that of her agency, boasted plenty of cultured and respected authors, but was relatively lacking in out-and-out commercial writers. The sort of writers who, with luck and a following wind, might provide the firm’s bread-and-butter business for years to come. In a small but meaningful way, her firm needed me. So I said yes to Felicity and sent a polite no to the CEO (whose career, however, seems to have ridden the setback well.)We sent the book out. I forget exactly how many publishers we approached, but perhaps about eight or nine. That number might sound low – there are thousands of publishers in the UK – but we were after those who could handle a big commercial novel: that is, ones who could pay a sizeable advance and have plenty of cash to put behind the book’s marketing. There weren’t, and aren’t, more than eight or ten such outfits in townIndeed, the ‘eight or nine’ figure somewhat exaggerates their number. The Hachette group, for example, owns Orion, Headline, Hodder & Stoughton, Little, Brown and Transworld. Hodder & Stoughton in turn owns John Murray. Those individual firms may bid separately for a particular work, but they’ll only bid against outsiders, never against each other. So if, for example, Orion and Headline are the last two bidders standing, the agent is not allowed to set the two off against each other, as they would do if the firms were genuinely independent. There are also some excellent smaller publishers, of course – Faber and Canongate, for example – but they’re not firms routinely capable of making a big play for big books.And we wanted big.We wanted big and we got lucky. Plenty of literary auctions can last weeks, even months. This one was a whirlwind. We got our first offer very quickly. Felicity instantly transmitted the existence of the offer to all other participants. The bidding rose very fast, so that some interested parties were blitzed out of the auction before they’d really had a chance to figure out their maximum price. Bids sailed through that magical ‘six figure sum’ threshold and continued on up. Finally, we were left with two bidders – Hodder and HarperCollins – each offering the exact same sum: £160,000 ($265,000) for a two book deal.(The two-book deal deserves a word of explanation. Most fiction is sold in two book deals, so the author is selling the manuscript he or she has already written, plus one more. That ‘plus one’ doesn’t need to exist. It doesn’t even need to exist as a twinkle in the author’s eye. It’s simply that first books are costly to launch, as a publisher has to establish a new author, who has as yet no readership, no profile with the trade. To recoup those costs, a publisher will generally hope to break even on the first book, and make some money on the second.These things aren’t, however, always well-explained to the newbie author. I know one author who was told, a couple of weeks prior to her first meeting with her new publisher, that her work would be acquired in a two-book deal. Oh crap, thought she, I’ve only written one. So she phoned her boss and told him that she needed two weeks off. She bought a load of coffee and wrote in a frenzy of sixteen hour days. By the time, she arrived at that first meeting, she had a draft manuscript of her second title. Needless to say, her publisher was astonished.)I went to see both top bidders, accompanied by my agent.Both meetings were broadly similar. We met an editor, a publicist, a sales guy, a marketer. Somebody senior, who popped in for two minutes to shake my hand and tell me how much heloved my book.Those expressions of love attract a certain amount of scepticism in the wider media. Hollywood, for example, tends to portray the publishing industry as composed of insecure, lying narcissists, who will love you one moment and stab you the next. I’m less cynical. The industry does, in fact, operate on passion. When an editor bids for a book, she’s not making that bid in isolation from the broader firm. On the contrary: she’ll have to solicit and secure support from the sales team from other editors, from senior colleagues, even (if the price tag is a big one) the Chief Executive. That’s not to say that all those people read every word of your book. They can’t and won’t. But a competent professional reader can imbibe fifty pages and think, Yes, this is the right kind of thing, the sort of thing we want to publish. Publishing claims to run on passion, and it really, truly does. It’s one of the nice things about it. If Hollywood portrays other media types as back-stabbing narcissists, it’s perhaps because they’re drawing on models that lie closer to home.So. Two firms. Two meetings. Two apparently similar groups of people saying two broadly similar things.The difference was the body language. HarperCollins, for reasons that still elude me today, made a big deal of that first book. Whereas Hodder took me to a cramped and windowless meeting room buried somewhere in the bowels of their Euston Road headquarters, HarperCollins took me to their boardroom. The Chief Exec of the entire UK company popped in to meet me. (He was called Eddie Bell, and had the bulldog manner of any successful Murdoch executive. He struck me, even in those few moments, as quite atypical for publishing.) There was also, I have no idea why, a huge platter of cheese on a sideboard. Stilton, celery, biscuits. ‘Have some cheese, Harry,’ cried somebody, wielding a knife.I don’t know if management texts have been written on the relationship between cheese provision in meetings and the successful outcome of those meetings. But the choice I faced seemed simple enough. Two nice, capable, eager bunches of people wanted my book. They both offered the exact same amount of money. The exact same level of royalties. Both wanted minor tweaks to my text, but nothing huge. Only one company seemed really, really eager – eager to the point of laying on entire bunches of celery simply by way of garnish. The other firm seemed great – but where was the cheese?So I signed up with HarperCollins. It was October 1998 and my new life had begun.

I’m Harry Bingham. I’m currently working on my tenth novel, have also written 4 non-fiction books, and worked as editor/ghost on several other published books. I’ve never previously written in detail about my adventures in the land of publishing, but here it is: the full story. I hope it’s of interest.These blog posts are timed to coincide with the release of The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths.

I've always wanted to be an author. Even as a very small child, I was passionately attached to the written word. When my parents read me Beau Geste, I was so overcome by the ending that i cried for the entire evening. when my father read me Sherlock Holmes, I was transported as it was possible for any listener to be.

My childhood was divided between London and Wales, and our Welsh cottage lay just a few miles from Hay-on-Wye, a small country town then as now given over entirely to the written word. The shop which dominated the trade was Richard Booth’s Old Cinema: a vast building, castled with books. There was no other bookshop like it in the country, except perhaps the same entrepreneur’s Old Fire Station (equally eccentric, but less child-friendly, at least back then.) Rather than operate the way second-hand booksellers had always operated in the past – handpicking one or two titles from the boxloads offered – Booth had gone industrial. When he got started, a lot of libraries were closing and he simply bought up container loads of books. Good books, bad books, collapsing books, strange books. He didn’t even know what he bought. Didn’t care, so long as it was cheap.The Old Cinema was crammed with the fruits of those raids. Anyone who calls themselves a bibliophile would have been tested, I think, by that bookshop. I mean, yes, there were treasures present, but in a way the dross was more striking. Edwardian medical almanacks. Old copies of Wisden. Tedious memoirs, authored by nobodies. Gazetteers of countries that history had long scrubbed from the map. Prewar scientific handbooks, that somehow still managed to smell of pipe smoke and tweed. Novels, lauded by reviewers of the day, but whose titles and authors had long vanished from memory.There was, theoretically, some sort of system to the shelving, but when books accumulate on that kind of scale, the cataloguing was never much more than notional. The overall impression was of some Borgesian Library of Babel, pulled through some Edwardian or interwar timewarp. Every possible book – everything that survived the warp, anyway – lay somewhere on those shelves, gently mouldering under old cloth bindings and fox marks blooming on every page. The Old Cinema contained the whole profusion of human thought, but with the one, niggly, proviso that it had to be human thought of the kind likely to lurk somewhere in your grandmother’s attic.There was, in those caverns, a little alcove for kids. You might find old comic book annuals, if you were lucky. Perhaps a Tintin or Asterix. For certain, some Edwardian tales of adventure aimed at spunky boys and venturesome girls. That little alcove yielded me regular harvests of pleasure. I first met John Buchan there. Built my collections of G.A. Henty and Jeffrey Farnol. First puzzled over the Riddle of the Sands, encountered Dornford Yates, met Bulldog Drummond, was introduced to the Saint.Most readers of my generation (I’m forty-seven) will be puzzled by those names. No doubt others of my generation will have read John Buchan and will faintly remember Roger Moore’s only slightly embarrassing turn as the Saint. But Dornford Yates? Bulldog Drummond? GA Henty, for heaven’s sake?There are only two ways to know those authors as I knew them. Either your birth date needs to fall in the early years of the twentieth century or you need to have grown up a short distance from Hay-on-Wye. The names that fed my childhood imagination have mostly (and mostly rightly) been consigned to the remainder bin of literary history. Bulldog Drummond, the creation of H.C. McNeile, was a thuggish, anti-semitic racist. Dornford Yates was kind of fun, perhaps, but he offered the sort of fun which revolved around British toffs in Rolls-Royces bashing comical little Frenchmen and ridiculous (but dangerous) Germans. Yates’s English women were always lovely, but got captured a lot, which would, I think, rather tend to offset their loveliness.As for Henty – and I have probably read more books by him than by any other author ever – his work is desperately old-fashioned. The Young Carthiginian, The Lion of St Mark, The Bravest of the Brave. No corner of history went unplundered. No book went unsubtitled. (True to the Old Flag: A Tale of the American War of Independence.) His heroes were generally youngsters on the brink between boy and man. Enemies were perfidious and if they got slain, often in vast numbers, that was, beyond question, a thoroughly good thing. He supported the ‘aristocratic’ Confederates (With Lee in Virginia) and was passionately hostile to the (insufficiently aristocratic) forces of the French Revolution. I’ve no idea what long-term effect those commitments have had on my political thought – perhaps none – but I’ve learned, disconcertingly, that Henty has enjoyed something of a revival among American home-schoolers. Odder literary renaissances have happened, perhaps, but not many.But I didn’t read Henty for his politics; I loved the adventure, the old-fashioned pluck. There was a character in Farnol (a village blacksmith, an honest soul) who encountered an uppity nobleman on horseback. The uppity nobleman demanded that the blacksmith ‘drop your hammer and hold my horse.’ ‘Certainly, sir,’ the good blacksmith replies, ‘if you will drop your horse and hold my hammer.’ I loved that stuff. The truth is, I probably love the same sort of thing now, albeit that I demand a slightly more sophisticated packaging. I read all of Hornblower, and Arthur Ransome, and Sherlock Holmes, and Susan Cooper. Lots of Dorothy L Sayers, a splash or two of Agatha Christie, dollops of GK Chesterton and Rider Haggard and the non-Holmes Conan Doyle. Sci-fi too. Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin (oh, the wonderful strangeness of that name! That ‘K’!)Time passed. The classics beckoned. My first real, proper, literary crush was with Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Becky and her still-adorable green eyes. I gobbled up Dickens and Jane Austen and George Eliot and the better Brontes. I remember where I was when I first read a lot of the really greatest fiction. The Great Gatsby: on a train from London to Abergavenny.Middlemarch: read in three days, while hopelessly sick in a Kathmandu guesthouse. The Age of Innocence: travelling on third class carriages on the Indian Railways. War & Peace andWuthering Heights: I read both books during my lunch breaks while working for the National Iranian Oil Company. (For real: my first paid job was at NIOC’s procurement arm in London It was mostly an ordinary, painfully dull, office job. Not so ordinary: the giant posters of the Ayatollah Khomeini in the men’s room.)And throughout it all, I devoured books. I loved them. I was going to be a writer.A writer who, however, first needed to make a couple of detours. The first detour was Oxford University, where I learned to write long sentences, replete with qualifiers and anything else which could get in the way of good, plain meaning.Then since Writer didn’t seem like a job that came with a pay cheque attached, I drifted into banking. I spent ten years or so in investment banking, mostly working in Mergers and Acquisitions at JP Morgan in London. There, I learned to remove all colour and meaning from my prose, and how to pepper my language with words like strategy and key and decision-pathand aggressive. I was still going to be a writer, of course, it’s just that other things had to happen first.And one important thing did happen in that first decade of my working life. I got an idea for a story. The idea was jewel-like in its simplicity. A rich man – very rich – would die, leaving three sons, whom he despised for being lazy and without ambition. So his will, rather than simply dividing up the money in equal thirds, would set them a test. The first son to make a million pounds – by himself, without the assistance or support of the others – would scoop the entire jackpot. If, after three years, none of the brothers had achieved that feat, all the money, every penny of it, would go to charity.The three brothers would be reluctant to take on the challenge, but they’d do it anyway. One would set himself up in business, buying an ailing furniture factory and seeking to turn it around. The second and third would become investment bankers: one a currency trader, the other a Mergers & Acquisitions guy, like myself.I didn’t know the details of the plot. Still less had I thought hard about prose style or characterisation or how to handle multiple points of view, or any of the other technicalities that can overwhelm wannabe writers. I just had my idea and allowed myself to fool around with it. It hadn’t really occurred to me that writing might be hard, or that I might fail. I just knew this was what I was going to do.I didn’t pressure myself with deadlines or word count targets. I didn’t care. I liked banking, but knew that one day I’d quit. When I did, I’d write that novel. There wasn’t a rush.As it happened, however, that day came wickedly soon. My wife, Nuala, and I were on holiday in Spain, when she started to feel ill. First it just looked like a bad flu. Then flu with conjunctivitis. Then those things, plus a weird brain illness that interfered with her vision and her speech and which was getting worse, hour by hour it seemed.We flew home.We saw doctors, of course, not that they were of much use. We received a varying set of diagnoses, but the common thread was that Nuala was suffering a major neuro-immune collapse brought about (most likely) by a type of enterovirus, a family whose most famous member brought about the polio epidemics of the mid-twentieth century.For a while, we fought the obvious. I went back to work and we brought in care assistants to look after Nuala in the day. The carers were nice, but they weren’t me. There were times when Nuala couldn’t speak intelligible English. Other times when she could find words, but spoke them the way a Russian might, if his entire knowledge of English sprang from a small pocket dictionary. So, for example, if Nuala wanted to say, ‘Can you pass me the glass of water, please?’ she was quite likely to say something like, ‘Water drinking machine, yes.’ Her first language, the language of her pre-school years and subsequent holidays, was German and when English failed, German sometimes came to the rescue. (Or sort of rescue. ‘Keks’, she used to demand, meaning biscuits. I used to tell her, patiently, that we didn’t have any cakes, but would she mind a biscuit, instead? ‘Keks’, she would say again, with insistence. We must have had that dialogue dozens of times all told. I never learned.) She couldn’t handle light at all, and lay most of the time in a darkened room. When she wanted a bath, I had to lift her into it. She lost weight, went pale as the moon.When it became clear that the illness wasn’t going to lift any time soon, I handed in my notice and left banking for ever.

Pressure on my bladder caused me to wake-up from a fitful sleep. It was raining buckets outside. I closed my eyes and hoped the feeling would go away; it was cold outside the confines of my warm covers.But to no avail; the rain sounded like Niagara Falls, and my body responded. The pressure on my bladder increased.I sighed, and tumbled out of bed; padded to the bathroom, turned on the light, and did the necessary without making a damp patch on the carpeted floor.I kept the light on and returned to the bedroom, picked up a bottle of spring water, and drank. I glanced at the bedside clock. In the gloom, I could see it read 3:20.Good.Another three hours before light. I returned to the bathroom and switched the light off, then made my way gingerly back to my bed.I was an early riser, but I also enjoyed my sleep. A while later I woke up. I glanced at the clock. The luminous hands showed 3:20. Puzzled, I stretched out and turned the bedroom lamp on. Then leaned back to check the clock.Yes, 3:20.Sleep didn’t overtake me. I lay awake thinking. Trying to remember what I saw before. In my mind’s eye I pictured a horizontal line from the 9 to the 3. Definitely, both hands were below that line the first time I awoke.So, maybe I hadn’t fallen asleep? Maybe I had dreamt it?Now I was fully awake. I padded out to the kitchen and made myself some toast. Last slice in the packet. I searched through the fridge for the butter and jam. The jam pot was nearly empty. Then I smelt burning; the toaster didn’t seem to work properly. I moved over and pressed the safety button. The toast popped out. I got a knife and scraped-off the burnt crumbs into the sink. I finished the jam, and left the jar in the sink to soak. I left the empty bread packet on the work surface. In the morning I’d clear up.Back to bed, and another draught of water to wash down the toast. I looked at the clock. 3:20. I sat there watching the second hand move up to the ‘12’. The minute hand jerked forward then back to 3:20. I sat there watching this endless process for several minutes.Crazy.I returned to the kitchen. The sink was a mess. I hadn’t imagined it. I hadn’t been dreaming.Crazy.Maybe I was hallucinating. I stayed up, thinking. What could I do at 3:20? It was dark, it was raining; couldn’t mow the lawn, shops were closed, as was my local. Not a bundle of laughs.The TV seemed to be stuck on one channel; I watched the same wildebeest being attacked by a croc in the Limpopo river crossing, several times. One minute replays. My laptop was the same. Clock 3:20. No news updates; everything had come to a halt. My mobile didn't work; what was happening?I took a couple of sleeping tablets and returned to bed to sleep it off. I lay there tossing and turning, afraid to look at the clock. Eventually, the tablets kicked-in and I drifted off for a while. When I woke it was still dark. And raining. I couldn’t look at the clock.I just couldn’t.But I did.3:20.

Author

Bio: British age 74 (young) retired and living in Thailand. Profession, Charity Auditor working in some 40 countries over the last ten years before retiring. Familiar with writing reports to professional standard. Sense of humour, reserved, realist and down to earth. Enjoy writing with a passion for the unusual.Genre: Fiction crime Email: stephenterry747@hotmail.comPhone: 0066823250835 Thailand